English String Miniatures

• English Miniatures for String Instruments
• Product type: ABIS MUSIC
• Brand: NAXOS
• John Rutter : Suite - Charles Wilfrid Orr : A Cotswold Hill Tune - George Melachrino : Les jeux - Peter Dodd : Irish Idyll - Cecil Armstrong Gibbs : Miniature Dance Suite - Frank Cordell : King Charles's Galliard - David Lyon : Short Suite - Roy Douglas : Cantilena - Philip Lane : Pantomime / Royal Ballet Sinfonia, dir. David Lloyd Jones

Amazon.co.uk Another attractive addition to the Naxos stable's commitment to light music, featuring 20th-century repertoire with the majority of the composers still living. The progression through three genres staves off the possibility of string texture fatigue. First up are folk-song arrangements, including the sparkling early Suite by John Rutter, which holds simplicity and inventiveness in an ideal balance, and, in A Cotswold Hill Tune, a rare excursion by C W Orr away from his dedication to writing haunting settings of A E Housman. Then, the sound and style of Peter Warlock's legendary Capriol Suite finds counterparts in Armstrong Gibbs's Miniature Dance Suite and Frank Cordell's King Charles's Galliard--pastiches of dance forms of earlier centuries. More fibrous fare is then provided by works which, barring the occasional backward glance, could be described as more "original", including David Lyon's Short Suite (complete with a haunting, all-too-short Aria) and Roy Douglas's searching Cantilena, with its echoes of Elgar. The orchestral playing occasionally lacks the last word in polish, but David Lloyd-Jones and the Royal Ballet Sinfonia are thoroughly in sympathy with this music. A bargain as an instant spirit-lifter. --Andrew Green Product Description English StringMiniatures English composers have had a strong empathy for stringensembles from Elizabethan times, whether it be in the works for viol consorts,the fantasias of Purcell, theItalianate Op.6 Concerti grossi of Handel, the suites of Parry,Elgar's Serenade and Introduction andAllegro, Holst's St. Paul's and Brook Greensuites, up to nearer our own time, with Britten's Simple Symphony and Bridge Variations and Tippett's Corelli Fantasia. The works presented here werewritten between the 1930s and 1970s, and can be viewed very much as part ofthis great tradition. Despite his prolific choral writing, the instrumentaloutput of John Rutter (b.1945) has been comparativelysmall. This suite, based on English folksongs was published in 1973, but has beensomewhat overshadowed by his ubiquitous carols and settings of the classictexts of the Gloria and Requiem. In addition to the eponymousfolksong of each movement there are additional counter-tunes in the outer ones -I sowed the seeds of love in the first,and The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington in the Handelianfinale. Charles Wilfrid Orr (1893-1976)was almost exclusively a composer of songs, mostly settings of A. E. Houseman.The one exception is this CotswoldHill-Tune, published in 1939 and dedicated to Eugene Goossens.Stylistically it is very much in homage to Delius butOrr steps out of his 'shadow' sufficiently often during the piece to reveal amore personal voice. George Melachrino (1909-1976)was a child prodigy on the violin, and earned a living in various dance bandsof the 1930s. During the Second World War he was the British equivalent ofGlenn Miller, gaining the title 'the sentimental Sergeant-Major' as the head ofa fifty-piece orchestra. After the War, he became one of the leading recordingartists of the day with a string of best-selling albums with his Melachrino Orchestra. His training as a string player isvery much in evidence in Les jeux (The games), the first of a set of pieces forstrings relating to everyday living. The music is anything but 'everyday' withits clever marriage of skittish good fun and emotional lyricism. Peter Dodd (b.1930) has spent much of his working life ina variety of posts in the music department of the BBC. This treatment of the traditionalIrish folk tune, The Lark in the clear Air,was published in 1971 and catches perfectly its subject in deceptively simpleterms without ever lapsing into the routine or predictable. The name of Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1889-1960) is thesedays associated with songs and partsongs - Song of Shadows, and Five Eyes amongst them, and Dusk, one of those handful of piecesbetter known when heard than when referred to. However, he wrote concertos and severalsymphonies (Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3are available on Marco Polo 8.223553) in a productive career. Yet it isprobably as a miniaturist that his reputation will stand, and so his Miniature Dance Suite is particularly representativein its gentle mockery of eigh